


And He Lands It

by ellerean



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Asexuality, Demisexuality, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-11
Updated: 2016-12-11
Packaged: 2018-09-07 23:29:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8820655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellerean/pseuds/ellerean
Summary: Only in the dim of a hotel room can Yuri begin to believe any of this is happening, least of all with the man whose face graces his bedroom walls, whose routines he's mimicked time and time again.But, no, he still doesn't believe it.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Set following episode 7, aka The Kiss.
> 
> Thank you, thank you, thank you to [starstarfairy](http://archiveofourown.org/users/starstarfairy) for beta reading and crying together about these two that I "don't even ship." (ha. ha. ha ha ha ha)

It’s embarrassing to think about it, now. The juvenile décor of his bedroom, the same room he’d slept in after putting on his first pair of skates. After he’d placed in his first competition. After he’d returned home, defeated. How he’d stared wide-eyed in the dark, thirty pounds heavier, trying to avoid each and every poster that graced his walls. Avoiding the ten pairs of two-dimensional eyes of Victor Nikiforov, the ancient posters wrinkled around the edges and miraculously still affixed with clear tape.

It’s easier to avoid the judgmental glare of his posters, now, hiding in the bathroom of a foreign hotel. The plush, white towel is soft on his sore muscles, the tile floor cold and damp beneath his bare feet. He stares at the mirror as he pushes his hair off his forehead, wondering if he looks any different.

“Yuuri, are you all right in there?”

The embarrassment of his childhood bedroom pales compared to sharing a hotel room with the living, breathing, Victor Nikiforov.

“Y-Yes, just a moment!”

He’d been ready to die the night that video had been publicized. He’d been tempted by the unseasonable April snow, a sign from the gods that he should bury himself in it rather than shovel the walk. Even still, they haven’t discussed Yuuri’s mimicking Victor’s choreography. They haven’t discussed his apparent skill when no one is watching. They haven’t discussed his quad flip—verbally—at least outside the constraints of a post-skate interview. He hadn’t landed it, as his sore hip gently reminded him, but he’d completed the rotations. It had been enough.

He quickly discards the hotel towel for the warmth of his pajamas.

He stares at his reflection again, all pink cheeks and oversize glasses. His fingertips are pruned from the shower. He touches his lips, like they would feel different. He’d applied ChapStick so many times since the end of his performance, paranoid how chapped they’d been from the ice, after . . . after . . .

“Yuuri, you will miss the replay! Come watch your shining performance!”

Victor is lounging atop one of the full-size beds, wearing little but a pair of gray-blue boxer shorts. Yuuri averts his eyes to the television, which displays his pre-skate pep talk with his dashing coach; he averts his eyes again, back to said coach, now sans jacket and tie. Then back to the television. Then back to Victor.

Victor Nikiforov pats the bed beside him. Not the Victor on television. But even the one on television is watching him, the view that Yuuri hadn’t been able to see as he’d skated onto the ice—arms crossed, his expression revealing nothing.

The swell returns to Yuuri’s throat, the remaining tears he’d thwarted before his performance. They are the culmination of failure and disbelief and joy. He finally turns his back on the television, from himself, and reaches beneath his glasses to pinch the bridge of his nose.

“Yuuri!”

He can’t decipher whether the voice had emitted from the flesh or the television, his name dulled by his own choked-back sob. Muffled cheering fills the room, the distant mutter of commentary ( _“And he lands it!”_ ). But the warmth on his back is _real_ , the arm that snakes around his torso, the body he feels through the back of his cotton T-shirt. It’s the cheek resting on the back of his head, and then the lips, and then the rumbling of Victor’s gentle laughter that vibrates through Yuuri’s body.

_ Don’t laugh at me! _ he wants to say, but it’s Victor Nikiforov, his idol and coach and—

“Please come to bed, Yuuri. We don’t have to watch it.”

But when Yuuri finally looks over at the television, it’s the end. It’s a close-up of him, panting, reaching toward an unseen audience. It’s him, bolting off the ice. It’s the blissfully naive version of him approaching Victor’s outstretched arms, and Yuuri watches because maybe the outcome will be different. Maybe it had been a dream, the crush of Victor Nikiforov’s lips on his, the hand cradling the back of his head as they crashed to the ice. It’s the silence of the commentators that confirms it was _real_

_ real _

_ real. _

He stares wide-eye at the television.

He swallows.

He closes his eyes, instinctively leaning back into the body supporting him.

Because if he were alone, if there weren’t those arms around his chest at that exact moment, he’d have collapsed.

But Yuuri still stands, albeit shakily, and the more liquid his knees feel the stronger Victor’s hold around him.

First there is the puff of breath, the deliberate warning at his ear that the kiss is forthcoming. Victor’s lips brush his shower-damp cheek. Yuuri had almost had a girlfriend, once, someone he’d spoken to in fragments between competitions, more a name on a phone screen than a real, live girl. He could count the number of times they’d interacted in person, if he could concentrate, which was proving difficult with Victor tugging at the collar of his shirt. It’s less a kiss than a drag of his lips, down from his neck to his shoulder.

The crux of intimacy is the instinctive way a coach understands the body, the experience developed over years of perfecting his own. So when Yuuri stiffens, Victor notices it before Yuuri himself knows it’s happened. It’s the lack of a response, the hardening of his shoulders as sweat trickles down between his blades.

“It is all right, Yuuri.” Victor steps away, fingertips lingering on the small of his back. “You are inexperienced. We will—”

“I am _not_ inexperienced!” he protests, a pointless lie.

He considers how physical connection is also a kind of development, even if it had been little more than lips on lips. Yuuri knows the pain in Victor’s expression before he turns to see it, regretting that he’s its reason, again, for the umpteenth time that day. Or perhaps it is just the third, not that he’s counting, three times too many that he’d caused Victor anything but unbridled joy.

Yuuri looks away. “I’m sorry. I don’t . . . know what to do.”

_ I’ve never wanted anything _ , he thinks, _nothing like this, not daring to think Victor Nikiforov would want someone like me, his hands and his arms and his lips on me, just a simple hug right now, but what if he wants more, more, more and I can’t or won’t or don’t want it, too?_

Yuuri closes his eyes when he hugs him, burrowing his face in the warmth of Victor's shoulder. His glasses hitch up against Victor’s neck, useless as they are with the tears blurring his vision anyway.

But Victor grasps Yuuri’s arms with a gentle force, not hard enough to pain him but enough to utter a gasp of surprise. He’s not conscious of the act of standing upright, only that now he is, staring up into the crystal clarity of Victor’s eyes—both of them, with his hair pushed back off his face, his fringe threatening to fall from where he’d pushed it back with a bit of water. Yuuri tilts his head up farther, the frames of his glasses askew and partially blocking his vision. It’s Victor who straightens them, nudging them back up his nose, his hand brushing a wayward tear in the process.

“You will do,” Victor says, “as Yuuri Katsuki will do.”

“Huh?” Yuuri frowns.

Victor kisses the crease between his brows. “Tell me what it is you want.”

He breaks his gaze away, staring past Victor to the two double beds. The television is still on, a commercial now from one sponsor or another whose logo he’d seen in a blurred frenzy of skating.

“I want”—he pauses, and Victor inches closer—“I want you to stay with me.”

“Is that all?”

Yuuri gently grasps Victor’s wrist. He’s seen enough romantic movies to know this part, this guidance toward one of the beds, which they stand beside with clasped hands. Victor is dry and warm, foreheads leaned together, as Yuuri breathes him in. This is the part where the movie fades to black, the assumed conclusion to a kiss and a love confession. It would be easy, he thinks, with Victor nearly naked, with Victor gently wiggling his fingers to release them from Yuuri’s. Victor’s hands on his back, fingertips beneath the hem of his shirt. Yuuri’s heart flops, like it’s forgotten how to beat, sending a warm rush into the pit of his stomach.

It’s both relief and disappointment when Victor releases him, turning alone toward the bed. His view of the television is no longer obscured; the program is long since over, the news commentators throwing opinions back and forth about something that is not figure skating. The screen goes black, and he hadn’t realized how much of the noise in the room had been the television until it isn’t there anymore. From behind him, he hears the gentle _clack_ of the remote control being set on the nightstand. There’s a rustle of the blanket, then the creak of the mattress.

Yuuri turns, his chest seizing again like he didn’t know Victor Nikiforov would be sitting up in bed. Head tilted, watching. Waiting for him. To do. _Something_.

Yuuri touches the headboard, the blanket; he knee bumps the mattress, because he didn’t realize it was already this close. He understands the fatigue of his own body, had learned years ago the fire in his thighs after pushing himself to his limit. His thighs burn, now, but it’s not the fatigue that’s leaving them shaking. Victor reaches over the empty space and then his hand is at Yuuri’s back, guiding him. Preventing him from crashing into the headboard, not letting go until Yuuri has slowly

slowly

settled in beside him.

When Yuuri inhales, he doesn’t realize he'd been holding his breath. The air is cold in his lungs; the tension in his shoulders and his back eases fractionally, his body still hyperaware of how small this bed actually is. Of how close Victor Nikiforov’s naked thigh is as they sit side-by-side, its warmth emanating beneath the blanket. Yuuri rests his hand in the small space between them, tentative yet hopeful, wondering why Victor’s hand isn’t there, too. He taps his fingers on the bed sheet.

“Yuuri.” Victor is examining his fingernails. “Was I wrong?”

Yuuri sits up straighter, waving both hands as he waits for his voice to work again. _No, no no . . ._ “No!” He coughs. “No!” He sighs, slumping back against the headboard. “I’ve never wanted a”—the word sound stupid even as he thinks it—“lover.”

“But you do now?”

He peers at Victor from over the edge of his glasses, deliberately blurry. He’s still in top form, slim but muscular. He wonders what it would be like to skate _with_ him, to share the ice with Victor Nikiforov. His heart drops into his stomach again. “Yes,” he replies, surprised by how confident it sounds.

There’s the brush of Victor’s fingertips on his hand, lighting his nerves on fire. Their hands dance unseen in the space between them, twisting and rotating to lock together, fingers intertwined. Victor is squeezing too hard for a mere hand-hold, Yuuri thinks, but he does nothing to change it.

“This is good,” Victor replies. “Because the entire world will now think we’re lovers.”

It’s Yuuri’s turn to squeeze too hard. “D-Did they say that?!”

But there . . . _there_. . . is that teasing smirk. Victor’s free hand traces the line of Yuuri’s jaw, thumb resting on his lips. “There are sure to be rumors,” he whispers. “Will they be true?”

It’s Victor’s turn to let out a gasp. It’s almost childlike the way Yuuri latches onto him, arms around his torso and cheek pressed to the wild pulse of his heart. Yuuri listens to the echoing throb inside Victor’s rib cage, which beats faster with each passing second. He feels the slow intake of breath, the steady way Victor’s chest rises as his lungs fill with the cool air of the hotel room. Yuuri’s glasses are eased off his face—he belatedly realizes they must’ve pinched Victor’s skin—and he watches the vague outline of Victor’s hand folding them neatly on the nightstand.

Only a single beside lamp is illuminated, casting a dim orange glow on the bed. The curtains had been drawn long ago; there isn’t even the distraction of the television anymore.

There is just

Victor Nikiforov.

There is no good way to sit on his lap without feeling overexposed. Yuuri is the one wearing pants, but when he straddles Victor’s thighs it feels like an invitation. He tries not to stare at the hinge of his own crotch, focusing on the widening of Victor’s eyes instead. Yuuri brushes the fringe away from his eyes—it had fallen, again, not that he was surprised—and Victor’s cheek is soft on his palm. Yuuri looks away for a fraction of a second, remembering.

The posters plastered in his childhood bedroom.

Sitting too close to the television during the Grand Prix Finals.

And mimicking his routines on the ice.

And

And

“Yuuri?”

And rushing into Victor’s arms, anticipating the congratulatory hug but feeling his lips instead, his too-soft lips against Yuuri’s chapped ones, a kiss he wish he could relive because he’d been too focused on _this is happening_ rather than the act itself.

“I don’t know what I want yet.” He holds onto both of Victor’s shoulders. “I just want . . . Victor.”

Victor slides his fingertips into the waistband of Yuuri’s pants, smirking as if that could conceal the blush. “You are embracing your true _eros_.”

Yuuri shakes his head. “This isn’t _eros_.” He looks away before he can catch the surprise on Victor’s face, but he doesn’t have to see it to know it’s there—the loosened grip around his hips; the sudden exhalation of breath.

“Th-That’s not what I meant,” Yuuri stammers, “I— I mean . . .” He rapidly shakes his head. “Why didn’t you give _me_ _agape_?!”

Victor’s mouth falls open, moving like words are supposed to come out.

Yuuri blushes from his neck to his ears to his cheeks. “Never mind!”

His nails dig into Victor’s shoulders as he comes in for the kiss. It’s too late now to retract it, his tongue meeting Victor’s before their lips meet, letting out a simultaneous breath of relief. It’s Victor’s gentle force again as he’s pulled closer, too preoccupied with kissing Victor Nikiforov to worry himself over the position of his crotch ( _Don’t_ think _about that, Yuuri!_ ). The first time had been a frenzied blur. Now he can drink it in, away from spectators, away from nosy interviewers.

Victor’s smiling when he breaks away. He’s close enough that Yuuri can clearly see the shine in his smile, the softening around his eyes. A mutual admiration, like Victor is the one with ten posters gracing his childhood bedroom. As if someone like Victor would admire someone like Yuuri, would want to share this victory, this hotel room, this bed.

It’s one fluid movement when they roll onto the bed, Yuuri on his back as Victor pulls the blanket over them both. They’re a tangle of limbs and sheets, a pillow smashed against the side of Yuuri’s face, and Victor’s knee wedged up between his legs.

_ “Ow!” _ Victor’s teeth scrape his lip as he writhes away in pain.

“Sorry!” Victor pats his head, his cheek, his chest, anywhere but the pain’s blossoming origin. “Sorry!”

But he ignores the dull throb as he cups the back of Victor’s neck. His hair is soft, freshly-washed. Victor kisses his forehead, the bridge of his nose. The giggle rises up from Yuuri’s throat; Victor's smile spreads against Yuuri's cheek. Victor leans over him, his breath warm and sweet on Yuuri’s mouth.

“Victor Nikiforov,” Yuuri whispers.

Victor pushes Yuuri’s hair back from his forehead. “That is me.”

_ It is. _

_ It is. _

**Author's Note:**

> ([Here on tumblr](http://ellereanwrites.tumblr.com/post/154347081428).)


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